What do you do?
I make paintings in my studio. The studio processes track a temporality of responsiveness to materials, textures and structural play. My methods include exploring and playing with rhythms of warm and cool colours, adding and removing veiled strokes of paint to reveal new pictorial effects, stretching and re-stretching canvas to find new tensions, and refusing to accept emerging forms that lack a spatial signature. I am invested in pursuing painting at the intersection of nature, culture, and spirituality, exploring the profound connections between the environment and human consciousness.
What could you imagine doing if you didn’t do what you do?
That’s a tricky question. I would like to either work as a researcher or conserving works on paper.
What images are pinned to your studio wall?
Doodles, pencil drawings, watercolours, a handmade paper kite and Joanna Margaret Paul’s beautiful drawing titled, sky symmetry. I am curious about the way she articulates her view of the sky with exquisite rhythmical coloured pencil patches and short, even repetitive, lines.
What is the first artwork that made an impact on you?
It’s hard to know. When I was very young, my mother’s and aunt’s watercolours fascinated me; I started to paint and draw.
Colin McCahon’s painting, I AM was the first museum exhibition I encountered –it was WOW- for its enormous scale and lack of pictorial imagery; opening my eyes to what an artwork could do.
Later at art school in the late 1980s; Fra Angelico’s lightness, Giorgio Morandi’s stillness, Paul Cézanne’s eye-popping movement, and Henri Matisse’s deep pictorial colour space greatly impacted my learning.
I was blown away by Julie Mehretu’s and Etel Adnan’s painting when I visited Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev’s Documenta 13 in Kassel, Germany.
What are you listening to?
Lately, I am hooked on Miles Davis, Kind of Blue.
What are you reading?
I’m enjoying The Ghost Map by Steven Johnson. I would describe it as a Victorian detective thriller. What’s fascinating is how a small community prevails with reason and proof over an accepted yet unproven concept. Often, it feels like a horror story close to our contemporary world.
Recently, I’ve started reading The Disordered Cosmos, A Journey into Dark Matter, Spacetime, & Dreams Deferred by Chanda Prescod- Weinstein.
What did you learn at art school?
I learnt so much; making friends with brilliant, creative people and communities was a highlight.
Any upcoming shows?
I am excited to show an exhibition titled Pouring Light at Sumer, 14th August to 14th September
Photo by Sam Hartnett.